Four Companies Using AI To Transform The World

Robot-shaped smartphones called RoBoHoN, developed by Sharp, on display at a press preview of the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies in Japan in October 2016. (Photo credit: TORU YAMANAKA/AFP/Getty Images)

Artificial intelligence is big no matter where you are in the world, and some of the largest companies in Asia are making significant investments in AI technology. But heavy-hitters like Baidu and Alibaba aren't alone.

Startups across the region are exploring the ways in which AI can help people make better decisions, secure themselves against financial risk, learn more effectively, and obtain more accurate disease diagnoses.

The Singapore-based company launched a pilot program in Lahore, Pakistan aimed at assisting farmers improve their crop yields this summer.

Pakistani women work in a rice field in Lahore on October 14, 2016. (Photo credit: ARIF ALI/AFP/Getty Images)

Using historical and real-time data gathered through satellites and hyperspectral imaging, ADDO AI’s team and its partners send planting, harvesting, and crop management recommendations to farmers who have insured their seeds through the program. The goal is to improve outcomes for the farmers and protect their lenders against risks.

ELSA: Breaking language barriers

ELSA -- which is an acronym for English Language Speech Assistant -- learns from speech data that’s fed into the system, then uses its understanding of native speech patterns to help users correct their pronunciations.

The data used to train ELSA is targeted to address pronunciation issues encountered by people from different parts of the world. Users declare their native languages and the program will adjust the curriculum based on common problem sounds for that demographic.

ELSA cofounder and CEO Vu Van (right) was inspired to create an AI-powered language-learning app following her own experiences learning to master English pronunciations. (Photo credit: ELSA)ELSA

Cofounder Vu Van shared that ELSA saw a 150% revenue growth during the past three months and now has a 90% percent accuracy rating for detecting pronunciation errors.

The app was also a top performer in the education category in the Vietnamese App Store in August.

Scry cofounders Justin Wang and Jia Huang Ho plan to use AI to harness people's predictive abilities around the globe and help them make more informed decisions. (Photo credit: IMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

Scry: Correcting human flaws

By developing a crowdsourced prediction engine, Scry is using machine learning to help people and companies make better predictions about how events will play out.

Humans tend to place great faith in industry experts, but they can make inaccurate and misguided judgments.

The Scry philosophy draws on research showing that non-experts with a high degree of analytical and probabilistic thinking were actually more capable of making viable predictions.

The platform crowdsources this knowledge and uses machine learning to enable users to gauge human predictions against the most likely outcomes so they can make better-informed decisions.

Cofounders Rohit Kumar Pandey, Apurv Anand and Tathagato Rai Dastidar created a low-cost digital scanner that allows lab technicians to digitize physical medical samples, upload them to a cloud platform for analysis by AI, and then make the samples and results available to pathologists, regardless of location.

This democratizes access to quality medical advice, since the results can be read and shared through telemedicine platforms.

By modifying microscopes that are standard across medical labs, rather than forcing providers to overhaul their systems completely, they're decreasing costs and therefore barriers to entry.

Pandey noted that any tech updates occur in the cloud as opposed to on the hardware, ensuring that technicians can use the scanners with ease and minimal disruption.

Casey Hynes is a freelance journalist and content marketing writer with extensive experience covering tech, entrepreneurship, and human rights in Asia. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School in 2008 and has written for The Wall Street Journal, Roll Call, South China ...